On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 mdoctorow@comcast.net wrote: (...)
is one of the best psychologists in California. I don't think that, being married to her for almost 4 decades, it is very likely that I fall under the category of "mental patients", so it isn't necessarily true that somebody who thinks that Telepathy and Clairvoyance may or probably do exist is a mental patient. (...) To say that these things exist is one thing. To claim them as yours is another. My intention was to say that this degree of intuition would be likely to interfere with routine matters. I won't go into why I don't believe in brain-2-brain video of some sort, but I also tried to outline the most likely channels that this kind of information might get through.
Far from denying that clairvoyance or telepathy might exist, I'm basically saying that there's also a price. In Western society, where personal communication comes at a premium (necessarily so in Canada for several days at a time in the Winter), I would wager that the price is too high for the most talented people who don't hav their intuition under control. In the bible, there are prophets. There are also times when they are false -- usually whenever and wherever witchcraft or idolatry are a big part of society. If the channels for such things as prophecy are indeed limited to a sophisticated interpretation of everyday perception, then I can vaguely see why the absence of such things as clairvoyance, telepathy, and prophecy would be automatic in North American society. By "absence" above, I mean the expression of these abilities, which is quite different from the potential. _______ Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.